This paper examines the policy rate recommendations of the Bank of Canada's Governing Council (GC) and the C.D. Howe Institute's Monetary Policy Council (MPC) since 2003. We find, first, that differences in the median recommendations between the MPC and the GC are persistent but small (i.e., 25...

The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professionals and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation in advance of the central bank's announcement. We explore differences between shadow and actual committee decisions based on an...

A common finding in the literature is that forward guidance cannot be credible under discretionary policy as long as the zero lower bound is an one-off event. However, this is not the case when recurring episodes of zero interest rates are possible. In this paper, we contribute to this new...

This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...

Due to its official mandate, the European Central Bank (ECB) is assumed to maximize an implied objective function that leads it to pursue inflation with a subordinate focus on supporting the general economic policy of the European Union. This objective is - by its very nature - difficult to...

To which degree can variation in sentiment-based indicators of central bank communication be attributed to changes in macroeconomic, financial, and monetary variables; idiosyncratic speaker effects; sentiment persistence; and random "noise" ? Using the Loughran and McDonald (2011) dictionary on a...

Do gender differences matter for politicians' budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social...

This paper studies the effects of FOMC communication on U.S. financial markets’ returns and volatility using a GARCH model over the period from 1998 to 2006. We build a new data set that includes information on all FOMC speeches, post-meeting statements, monetary policy reports and...

We study the effects of U.S. monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock and foreign exchange markets’ returns and volatility over the period 1998 to 2006 using a GARCH model. Firstly, we show that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets....

Using a GARCH model, we study the effects of Canadian and U.S. central bank communication and macroeconomic news on Canadian bond, stock, and foreign exchange market returns and volatility. First, news in both categories and from both countries has an impact on all financial markets. Canadian...